


at the expense of the death of a bachelor

by queenofthestarrrs



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Black Character(s), F/M, POV Second Person, Post-Black Panther (2018)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 21:19:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13843242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofthestarrrs/pseuds/queenofthestarrrs
Summary: You walk Erik’s body through the sixteen miles of heavy forest to the capital city.





	at the expense of the death of a bachelor

Your father does not speak to you in the ancestral plane anymore. 

He stares at you. You can feel his eyes, eternally opened, brimming with tears, and staring at you. His mouth is slack, as if it was going to say something to you. Guilt radiates off of his being in waves. It feels like it's grasping at your neck, choking you. The sensation makes you shift from foot to foot, the tall grass tickling against your calves. 

You wake up gasping to breathe. 

 

-

You walk Erik’s body through the sixteen miles of heavy forest to the capital city. 

It’s grueling. He is, was, a big man, over two hundred pounds of solid thickness. It seems strange to refer to him as a was, even if you had just met him only a few days, even if you had only found at that you even had a cousin as he threatened to take anything you had ever held dear. For the first time, you feel the gapping ache of something you never even had, something you never even knew was missing. 

Your muscles scream out in angry resistance as you drag your cousin’s lifeless body up and down the rocky terrain. Your lungs scream out for the cool clean air of your room, for the balcony that overlooks your mother’s garden. You barely even realize that you’re crying until you’re halfway through, on mile eight. 

The people come out to greet you. They are excited to see their king. Small children look at you eagerly, the symbol of all your great nation is. You are the Black Panther. You are the icon. You are the hero. You are the king. 

You cower from their gaze, hiding your face. You practically bury into your cousin’s shoulder, his skin now cool in death. Right now, in your unspeakable, unexplainable, and distinctly private grief, you want to simply be a man. 

You are not sure if that will ever be possible again, to separate the panther from the man. 

-

You ask the council of elders, plead with them really, to give him a proper burial. He was a prince, you reason. He was your king, in a brief and sullied moments, you asset. He was your family, you whisper. 

Every part of your body, down to the atoms that make up your core, shake with a cool rage. You do not want to explode in front of them. You continue to nurture your grief in private, your own secret vice. You allow the sadness to gnaw at you, to transform you into a better man. 

They deny you. 

You do it anyway because you are the king. 

-

You meet your uncle in the ancestral plane. 

You do not like this apartment that have sent you too. It’s dirty and cramped and even in this limbo place, this place in between life and death, the air is stale. You can feel the choking of grief grabbing at your throat again. You grasp angrily at the generic African prints that hide their weapons of death and destruction. You want to speak. You want to apologize for your father’s actions, for your own inaction. You want to beg for forgiveness. You want to scream. 

Your uncle is not bothered by your grief. He no longer thinks of the affairs of Wakanda, not after it has taken his life and the life of his blood, the lives of so many of his people, of Black people with their lack of resolution. He simple sits and looks at the window. He is regal, a would be king, the blue-purple of the lights melting into his skin. 

You wake and vomit. 

-

You take Nakia and Okoye with you to bury him. 

It seems only natural. You have done nearly everything together since you were children. There was not a time in your life, that you can remember, when there was not the sound of two fast and strong sets of footsteps intune with yours. You do not even need to ask. You simply carry the body onto your ship, and suddenly they are there. 

You fly in near silence. It is for the best. You do not wish to speak about this. You do not wish to speak about the abstract futures, of things that have not yet come to fruition. You do not want to, as of right now, look at what is bubbling just below the surface.You simply want to do what needs to be done in order to find a lasting peace. 

You wrap your cousin in the family cloth. He looks good in it, the rich yellow blending into the creaminess of his skin. You painstakingly adjust and readjust until you are happy. You move swiftly to attach the weights that will carry his body down down down into the barren deep. 

Okoye stops the ship over the Atlantic. You carry the body to edge. There is a part of you that wants to quote Shakespeare, “Good night, my sweet prince, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” You hate Shakespeare, found his stories boring and uninspiring. But it is too easy for you to imagine a younger Erik sitting in American classroom and reading the same play that you did, at the same time. 

It is a selfish thought. You know, from what little you do know of your cousin, that he would hate to be sent to his final resting place with a colonizer’s words. 

So you simply proclaim, “Praise the ancestors,” and drop him as gently as you can. 

 

-

Nakia finds you, in your mother’s garden, weeping. 

You carry so much grief. The loss of your father, of your cousin and your uncle, of should have beens and the could have beens. It creates a great toll on your body until you can no longer handle it. 

She does not coil away from you in disgust. Instead she cradles your in her arms and does not speak. She smells like soap and sandalwood and the oil she wears in her hair, specially blended by the River Tribe. 

You feel closer to her, closer than you ever had before. You are more together now than when you laid in each other’s bed. You are more together now than even the first time that you explored the delight to be found between her legs at the age of eighteen. You are more together now then when you had ever held hands and professed to love each other forever the night before your father named you as heir. 

To lay one’s self completely bare, to be exposed to the most vulnerable and messy parts of one’s being, and not be turned away, that was true love. 

It feels like coming home, like being embraced by Wakanda herself. 

 

-

 

You think you find Erik surrounded by the ancestors. 

There is faintest glimpse of him in the crowd whose hair floats above them as if they were submerged under the water’s edge. There are people dancing and shouting and chanting and deeply alive. You can hear laughter ring out in every corner, and the sound of the legends of many different tribes who had once dotted across Africa. This is not an evil place. This is not a place of mourning, the place of those who chose death over bondage. This is a defiant celebration of the continent’s culture stretching, undisturbed, into the end of time. 

Your head feels clouded as you push past the masses, as you try to find him. But each time you believe you have taken hold of him ridged skin cold against yours, he slips away again, like water. 

You awake and you are unexplainably soaking wet. 

 

-

 

You watch a child’s eyes glow with luminesce as Shuri and Nakia work into tandem. 

They teach these lessons whenever they are in America together. They weave together a wonderful expanse of technology and science and history and culture. They exude pride and talent and competency and love. They have taken the heavy role of black excellence, of African greatness, and they have run with it. 

The children laugh and play with you during their lunch break. They take you outside and have you play basketball with them. You are horrible at it, and they tease you to no end. Shuri pops out from inside the center to throw a perfect three pointer, and then to tease her older brother. The children woop and yell to know end. They then spirit you over and teach you how to double dutch as they blast Beyonce on their cell phones. You can barely keep up with the beat as the two girls swing the rope in time with the music. They giggle and cheer you on. 

You smile and smile and smile the whole day until your cheeks hurt. 

 

-

You fall asleep on your flight home from America.

You have a dreamless rest for the first time in months. 

It is a blessing.


End file.
